When he was president of the Modern Language Association, Michael Bérubé described the myriad challenges facing doctoral education as “a seamless garment of crisis.” That was 2013. I’m reluctant to use the word “crisis” to describe problems we’ve faced for more than 50 years, but the seamless-garment metaphor remains spot on in 2025.
Shrinking financial support for the humanities has affected the size and scope of graduate study in those fields. That issue is unavoidably linked to undergraduate education, because it hardly makes sense to admit graduate students into humanities programs — or hire new faculty members in those fields — if there are no undergraduates to teach. So if graduate education in the humanities is going to survive and thrive, we have to fix the problem of declining undergraduate enrollments in our courses and majors.
Everyone is looking for success stories to emulate, and that’s why I’m devoting this month’s column to Washington University at St. Louis. A healthy and wealthy university by any measure, Wash U. hasn’t escaped the general malaise gripping the humanities across higher ed. The number of English majors, according to the department, had been steadily declining at the university but reached an alarming low in 2018 when it dipped below 100, out of more than 7,000 undergraduates.
It “freaked us out,” recalled William J. Maxwell, a professor of English and then the department’s director of undergraduate studies. Realization dawned: “We weren’t paying enough attention to this.”
The department embarked upon “a conscious project to turn this around.” Faculty members had to go “above the treetops,” said Vincent Sherry, who was chair at the time. “Then we could see the department as something that belongs to all of us.” Their strategy is working and just waiting to be adapted across the humanities and beyond. The number of English majors at Wash U. has risen steadily for seven years and nearly doubled since that 2018 low. I visited the campus, interviewed faculty members and students, and found that English is now thriving there at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
How are they doing it? Via the following four interwoven themes.
Build on your strengths. The department started with the twin observations that (a) its creative-writing offerings were popular; and (b) the creative-writing professors were well-regarded and supported a successful M.F.A. program. “We wanted to emphasize the importance of our writing program in the context of traditional English education,” said Maxwell, so the department added an undergraduate concentration in creative writing, and another in publishing.
The change didn’t simply amount to lashing a creative-writing life raft to a sinking literary boat. Instead, said Maxwell, the department “reconceived what the boat is.” The new concentrations weren’t just add-ons; they were woven into the department’s curriculum and helped change its teaching culture.
Some English departments keep creative writing and literary study separate, but “there isn’t a divide between scholars and creative writers” here, said David Schuman, director of creative writing. Both groups know that they strengthen the department together, he said, and they are part of a “common cause.” The fact that writing “is so present in the major now,” added Maxwell, “makes me do different things as a teacher. I’ve developed new assignments, like asking students to write in the style of a writer they read.”
The faculty also updated the traditional literature-based English major. Students still take required historical surveys, but the department redesigned the courses to globalize them and also added a minority and global-literature requirement (which can be fulfilled by different courses). These changes helped to attract a more-diverse population of interested students to the major.
Actively recruit top students. The changed curriculum didn’t attract students by itself. Sherry, the former chair, helped develop a strategy of direct outreach to strong students. “Talented kids are used to being recruited,” said Maxwell, so the department developed a plan to invite them to be English majors.
The first step involved contacting faculty members who teach first-year seminars and writing courses in a department other than English. They were asked for the names of their top five students along with, crucially, a few details of work they did in class. Each first-year student then received a personalized email, a practice that continues today. “We ask them: Have you considered majoring in English?” said the current chair, Abram Van Engen.
Most have not. “We suggest that there’s a door that they can walk through” to consider a major or minor, said Melanie Micir, the department’s director of graduate studies. And many choose to walk through it.
Talk about the employment outlook. But most students don’t cross that threshold without checking with their families. The decision to major in English has to clear “the hurdle of parental perception,” said Van Engen. Parents have seen the flood of articles arguing that a humanities major is a ticket to the unemployment line. Easily available data from the Humanities Indicators project (for example, data on the employment status and earnings of humanities majors with a bachelor’s degree) show that to be a canard. But that fact doesn’t matter if parents believe their negative impression to be true. Van Engen recalled “a student whose parents wouldn’t pay for her college education if she majored in English.”
“Giving those students an answer is important,” said Van Engen. The department therefore created fact sheets for prospective majors to show to their parents. “Students have an appetite to write,” said Van Engen. “They want to create stories, read stories, know stories.” The statistics show that strong story skills lead to good jobs. By better communicating that fact, the department shows those skills to be worth paying for.
The department backs up the statistics it collects with its own career-liaison work. Professors invite the department’s alumni to share how they shape a career with a humanities degree. Such close-to-home stories, along with articles from national media outlets, Van Engen said, help students and their families to see the value of the humanities in the world.
Put your best teachers in front of your least-experienced students in introductory classes. The value of a humanities program begins with the instruction that students receive — and to maximize it, the department accomplished perhaps its most profound change in practice.
Professors are socialized to love their upper-level teaching best, and that work typically confers the most prestige. At Wash U., the English department agreed to put its best teachers in front of first- and second-year students. (Said Van Engen: “You don’t build a major around juniors.” You have to pitch the major to students sooner than that.)
To change its pedagogical focus, the faculty changed its values. Rewards (such as a departmental teaching award) provided recognition and shifted the prevailing value system. Teaching survey courses and first-year seminars may be viewed elsewhere as a chore, but here, Van Engen said, people “find it to be an honor.”
This upstream achievement has had downstream impact. Students talk to each other, and they spread the news. And on the faculty level, “the more we grow, the more the dean gives us new hires,” the chair said. In the last five years, the department has hired more than 10 people to the tenure track — how many other humanities departments can say the same?
This commitment to teaching introductory courses extends to the department’s hiring practices. “We ask how a candidate will appear in the classroom to first- and second-year students,” said Van Engen. “Can they generate excitement around literature? This matters in our deliberation.”
Together, those actions have built community. They’ve resulted in a culture of personal connection across the department that includes more teaching collaborations (both faculty pairs and professor/graduate-student partnerships) and more co-curricular gatherings that draw professors, graduate students, and undergraduates, separately and together. There are ghost-story readings on Halloween, and an undergraduate club called the Creative Writing Café combines writing workshops with appearances by visiting writers. There’s also an undergraduate literary magazine that is supervised by graduate students. At a popular annual event, faculty members choose a book from their shelves and inscribe it with a note. English majors and minors come to the gathering and leave with a book. “It’s an invitation to cross-generational connection,” said Micir, and a way for students to get to know their instructors outside the classroom.
It’s also a way to build ties among people, not just to a discipline. We wanted to create not just a major but “a place where students can go to feel that they’re part of a community,” said Schuman, the department’s creative-writing director. In this spirit, doughnuts and coffee draw faculty members and students for an informal social hour every Friday morning.
What does all of that mean for doctoral education? From this thick social-root system branches a vibrant and thriving graduate program that benefits from the communal health and spirit of the department as a whole. Bérubé was right about the seamless garment. Everything in an academic department is connected — and not just the problems. The good stuff also connects, and the success of the graduate program in English at Wash U. shows that.
“Graduate students are not siloed here,” said Micir, its graduate director. Most of the department’s research and writing groups — on subjects as varied as Kierkegaard and writing pedagogy — are initiated and run by graduate students, she said, and professors regularly participate. Graduate students serve on hiring committees, and the department solicits their input on job candidates who visit the campus. Graduate-student representatives are also invited to participate at major department meetings when collective concerns are identified.
The department has created faculty committees specifically for the professional development of its graduate students: on job placement, on a summer digital-humanities workshop, and on a robust mentorship program that includes paid internships. “We encourage this,” Micir said. “We want to take graduate students seriously as professionals” and allow them to customize the program to meet their own needs. The students see that: “You’re not put on a train track from point A to point B,” as one student put it.
The support is also financial. Every student I spoke with commended the department’s commitment to equity: Students don’t compete for financial opportunities at Wash U. They’re all admitted with six years of guaranteed financial support. “We try to build a collegial environment where all have their needs met by the program,” said Micir, “so they can focus on their studies, have funds for travel and conferences and archives, and compete for academic prizes without feeling as though their food and shelter depend on it.” There are selective awards that students compete for, but they’re not tied to financial support. That promotes collegiality and peer support among graduate students. That atmosphere “was one of the top-selling points of the Ph.D. program for me,” said Charlotte Fressilli, who received her degree this past summer.
Kristin Emanuel, a fourth-year Ph.D. student who also holds an M.F.A., appreciates the convergence of creative writing and critical research in the department. “I knew there would be a place for me,” she said. She also values the structured interaction at monthly meetings devoted to graduate-student concerns, with panels on specific topics such as how to get the most out of a mentor relationship. This “student space” gave Emanuel a “sense of larger community” that unites individual cohorts.
Kate Guadagnino, who just received her M.F.A., said her professors treat her like a peer. They would ask, “How’s your teaching going? What stories did you put on your syllabus?” As a result, Guadagnino said, “I forged relationships that will last after my official relationship with Wash U. ends.”
Students can’t join a curriculum, but they can join a community. On both the graduate and undergraduate levels, the example of Wash U. shows that students value curricular culture, not just curriculum itself. “The more ways that you create community,” says Van Engen, “the more the community attracts people.” They say, “I want to be part of it.”
That community has to have values. You can’t pretend to care about teaching — you actually have to walk the walk. Or as Maxwell put it: “It’s a matter of letting students know you give a shit about their education and the major.”
Rescuing the humanities isn’t going to be easy. Every department could identify its own strengths and devise a plan for how to translate those commitments into a community that attracts students. The English department at Wash U. shows it can be done.
